The Shirley Valentine Role Gave Pauline Collins a Character to Equal Her Ability. She Seized It with Flair and Glee

During the 1970s, this gifted performer rose as a smart, witty, and cherubically sexy female actor. She developed into a recognisable star on either side of the Atlantic thanks to the hugely popular UK television series the Upstairs Downstairs series, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

She portrayed Sarah, a pert-yet-vulnerable servant with a shady background. Her character had a connection with the handsome driver Thomas, portrayed by Collins’s off-screen partner, John Alderton. This turned into a TV marriage that the public loved, which carried on into spin-off series like Thomas and Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

Her Moment of Brilliance: Shirley Valentine

But her moment of her success came on the silver screen as Shirley Valentine. This freeing, naughty-but-nice story paved the way for future favorites like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, sunshine-y comedy with a excellent part for a seasoned performer, broaching the theme of female sexuality that was not limited by conventional views about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the growing conversation about perimenopause and females refusing to accept to being overlooked.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: the play Shirley Valentine, the longing and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the celebrity of London’s West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously chosen in the smash-hit movie adaptation. This very much paralleled the alike path from play to movie of the performer Julie Walters in Russell’s 1980 play, the play Educating Rita.

The Story of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a down-to-earth Liverpool homemaker who is tired with existence in her middle age in a tedious, lacking creativity nation with boring, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she takes it with eagerness and – to the astonishment of the boring British holidaymaker she’s traveled with – stays on once it’s finished to encounter the authentic life away from the resort area, which means a delightfully passionate fling with the charming native, Costas, played with an bold mustache and dialect by Tom Conti.

Sassy, sharing the heroine is always breaking the fourth wall to share with us what she’s pondering. It got big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he loves her body marks and she comments to viewers: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Post-Valentine Work

Post-Shirley, Pauline Collins continued to have a lively professional life on the theater and on TV, including roles on the Doctor Who series, but she was less well served by the movies where there didn’t seem to be a writer in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a genuine lead part.

She starred in director Roland Joffé's decent set in Calcutta drama, the movie City of Joy, in 1992 and featured as a English religious worker and Japanese prisoner of war in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road in 1997. In filmmaker Rodrigo García's trans drama, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins returned, in a way, to the servant-and-master environment in which she played a servant-level housekeeper.

Yet she realized herself often chosen in patronizing and overly sentimental silver-years stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as eldercare films like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as poor located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Director Woody Allen offered her a real comedy role (albeit a brief appearance) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the dodgy psychic referenced by the film's name.

Yet on film, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a tremendous time to shine.